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An important cross-disciplinary work, The Tree That Bends reveals the flexibility of the Maskoki people and the sociocultural mechanisms that allowed them to survive the pressures introduced at contact. Their world was capable of incorporating the New without destroying the Old, and their descendants not only survive today but also succeed as a discrete culture as a result.


 

Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct.

Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.

Reduced state funding to public institutions. The removal of tenure from state statutes. Attempts to silence faculty. Michael Bernard-Donals takes on these issues and other crises in higher education in The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education, exploring how values once used to justify higher education—the democratization of knowledge, the fostering of expertise, the creation of well-informed citizens, and critical engagement with issues—have been called into question.

Bernard-Donals argues that public higher education, especially the work of faculty, has become vulnerable—socially, politically, professionally—and this book takes seriously the idea of vulnerability, suggesting that university faculty see it not as an encumbrance to their work but as an opportunity to form relations of solidarity with one another through mutual recognition and shared, albeit different forms of, precarity. Through a series of case studies on faculty rights and responsibilities, the efficacy of diversity initiatives, and tenure and academic freedom, Bernard-Donals employs a rhetorical perspective to show how vulnerability can reshape faculty work and provide ways to shift the relations of materiality and power while opening up new forms of deliberation, engagement, and knowledge production.

These autobiographical and analytical essays by a diverse group of professors and graduate students from working-class families reveal an academic world in which "blue-collar work is invisible." Describing conflict and frustration, the contributors expose a divisive middle-class bias in the university setting. Many talk openly about how little they understood about the hierarchy and processes of higher education, while others explore how their experiences now affect their relationships with their own students. They all have in common the anguish of choosing to hide their working-class background, to keep the language of home out of the classroom and the ideas of school away from home. These startlingly personal stories highlight the fissure between a working-class upbringing and the more privileged values of the institution.

While local conditions remain at the forefront of writing program administration, transnational activities are slowly and thoroughly shifting the questions we ask about writing curricula, the space and place in which writing happens, and the cultural and linguistic issues at the heart of the relationships forged in literacy work. Transnational Writing Program Administration challenges taken-for-granted assumptions regarding program identity, curriculum and pedagogical effectiveness, logistics and quality assurance, faculty and student demographics, innovative partnerships and research, and the infrastructure needed to support writing instruction in higher education.

Well-known scholars and new voices in the field extend the theoretical underpinnings of writing program administration to consider programs, activities, and institutions involving students and faculty from two or more countries working together and highlight the situated practices of such efforts. The collection brings translingual graduate students at the forefront of writing studies together with established administrators, teachers, and researchers and intends to enrich the efforts of WPAs by examining the practices and theories that impact our ability to conceive of writing program administration as transnational.

This collection will enable writing program administrators to take the emerging locations of writing instruction seriously, to address the role of language difference in writing, and to engage critically with the key notions and approaches to writing program administration that reveal its transnationality.